Cabet

Étienne Cabet (1788-1856), the son of a master cooper of
revolutionary sympathies, attended the Dijon lycée and
qualified as an advocate. He joined the Fédération
Bourguignonne in the Hundred Days and defended local
Bonapartists during the White Terror. Moving to Paris he got to
know Lafayette, joined and broke with the charbonnerie
and came to share the Orleanism of another Parisian associate,
Laffitte. Involved in the Restoration liberal electorial
organizationAide-toi, le ciel t'aidera and the July
Days in Paris, he served briefly as government prosecutor in
Corsica.

A left wing opposition deputy for Dijon in 1831, Cabet's critical
account of the limited consequences of the July Revolution led to
five prosecutions. He became general secretary of the
Association libre de l'Education du Peuple, formed by
students and graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique to offer evening
classes, medical services and a labor exchange to workers. Cabet
also edited their paper, Le Fondateur, and in July
1833 began Le Populaire, unique because it was partly
owned and written by artisans themselves. Its ten francs annual
subscription was a fraction that of any other paper and in less
than two months its circulation was twelve thousand. Seventy
subscription groups and reading circles for artisans were set up.
It was also distributed in Paris by twenty four public hawkers. In
1834 Cabet received the severest sentence ever imposed for press
offenses, two year's jail, a fine of 4,400 francs and four year's
subsequent civil death. He preferred exile and spent the next
five years writing furiously in England.

Amnestied in 1839, Cabet returned to Paris. In 1840 he published
Voyage en Icarie which encapsulated his new, intensely
moral communist philosophy. The two volumes were reprinted five
times up to 1848, but subsequently neglected. The distant island
of Icaria was seen through the eyes of a young English lord,
Carisdall. Icaria dispensed with the social evils of early
nineteenth-century capitalism by eliminating all competition and
private ownership. Any foreign trade was conducted by the
community and domestic commerce disappeared. There was no money.
Everyone contributed to the economy and in equal measure drew from
it. But Icaria did not look back to an idealized artisan society;
it had a modern, machine-age economy, with railways and canals.

Icarie was the perfect representative and direct democracy. The
rights of the community took complete precedence over the demand of
the individual. Cabet elaborated on the egalitarian aspects of
Icarian social organization, from the types of housing, furniture
and food, to the system of education. His utopianism was entirely
bound up with an Enlightenment-inspired confidence in the
preeminent influence of reason developed through education and the
rejection of revolution.

In March 1841 Le Populaire reappeared. By 1846, with
a circulation of 4,500, it was outselling other radical papers.
Each copy probably had about twenty-five readers. It was
written in simple language, as was Cabet's widely-circulated annual
Almanach. Three-quarters of Le
Populaire's shareholders were artisans. Cabet soon became
the acknowledged leader of a worker's movement, Le
Société pour fonder l'Icarie (the Icarians), which
was rather ironical in view of his initial belief in social harmony
and rejection of confrontation. By 1844 there were about 100,000
Icarians. Paris and Lyon were the two main centers, with groups in
seven-eight departments. Most supporters were traditional
artisans; only about 4% were middle class. Icarianism had a
particular appeal to threatened tradesmen such as cabinet-makers,
textile-workers, and shoe-makers. Only three of the twenty-two
cities where there were subscribers to Le Populaire
were modern industrial centers. Icarianism spread through word-of-mouth
and the vast stream of publications. There were neither mass
meetings nor a sophisticated bureaucracy.

In the 1840s Cabet took up a new cause, women's rights. Religion
replaced the idea of class struggle, with Jesus representing the
suffering workers. Cabet's Le Vrai Christianisme sold
2,000 copies in twenty days and helped to retain some of his
bourgeois adherents. Cabet also espoused the notion of a model
community. Although some former Fouerierists were won over to
Cabet, many Icarians left the movement. Nearly 30% of the
subscribers of Le Populaire in November 1846 had
withdrawn a year later and the paper began to print only one
edition a week in April 1847.

Cabet launched a project for the establishment of a community in
association with the English utopian, Owen. Only sixty-nine
Icarians agreed to set off, alarmed by Cabet's autocratic
attitudes. Each had to supply six hundred francs towards a
homestead of 320 acres in the Red River area, but it emerged that
Texas, not the land agent with whom they were negotiating, owned
some of the land. On the eve of the February Revolution Cabet was
charged with swindling would-be-settlers.

Cabet urged Icarians to support the new republic and turned his
back on a group of his followers who tried to create up a model
community in France itself. He set up a club, the
Société fraternelle centrale, which became
the largest and most influential of the many clubs at the time,
holding meetings which attracted up to 5,000 people. The highest
point of the revolution for Cabet was the demonstration of March
17, when 150,000 people gathered to demand that elections for a
constituent assembly be delayed in order to convert the majority to
vote republican.

Cabet's name was removed from Ledru-Rollin's list of candidates and
Icarians were hounded. Cabet meanwhile continued to deplore
violence and to think once more of emigration, now to the Mormon
village of Nauvoo, Illinois. He had no role in the demonstrations
of May 15, or the June Days. The day after Louis Napoleon's
election as president, Cabet set sail for America. Icarainism had
collapsed in France, and he hoped to rescue the American venture.
However, in 1850 he was forced to return to answer charges of
mismanagement. During 1851 he joined Leroux and Blanc to found
La République populaire et sociale, but the coup
d'état forced it to close. Cabet found little consolation in
the Icarian producer-cooperatives in Lyon and elsewhere in France.
He returned to America, quarrelled with the colony at Nauvoo, where
colonists disliked his authoritarian attitudes, ad in 1855 moved to
another experiment in St. Louis, where he died shortly afterwards.
Nauvoo survived until the end of the century.
Pamela M. Pilbeam